Times are changed, alas! "The Harmsworth Magazine," though, indeed, it appeals to an English-speaking audience of over one hundred millions, will at best provoke a little favourable comment in the train and the library, for the Magazine field has been vastly exploited, and especially of late. A modern buyer of periodical publications rises as warily to a new lure as a twice-shot-over partridge to the gun.
The reader of Magazines has of late years been harried by a direct, by an enfilading, and a ricochetting fire of new adventures, some honestly and avowedly frivolous, others portentously literary, a few loftily artistic. Every imaginable plan has been adopted whereby his capture might be effected. Projectiles calculated to vanquish by size and weight of paper have been hurled at him; there have even been surreptitious and spy-like attempts to enter his domestic circle by seeking the favour of his wife and daughters by means of "Women's Departments," all frocks, furbelows, and complexion cures; and worse, his very children have been attacked by page on page of "Nursery Chat" and "Tiny Tales for Little Listeners."
Last straw of all, he has been patronised by the vast army of "Great Authors" of the period. And if the chit-chat of the press is to be believed there never were in Rome, in Athens, or in the days of Elizabeth herself, so many distinguished litterateurs as at present. The unfortunate victim has trembled at the solemn pomp of
"The editor of the 'Monster Magazine' has pleasure in announcing he has been so fortunate as to secure the masterpiece of Mr. ——."
or,
"It is rumoured that Mr. —— has been induced to enter into an agreement to contribute an important series of short stories to the "Monster Magazine" during the Spring of 1905. Mr. —— is entirely occupied in the fulfilment of various contracts until that time."
It is "right here," as our American kinsmen have it, that "The Harmsworth Magazine" comes in.
Together with a great many other people, we came to the conclusion long since that a good deal of the literary wares that are foisted on the public by means of the ordinary advertising methods of personal paragraphs and "interviews" is mainly rubbish. Frankly and openly do we, therefore, declare that mere "names" will never command an entrance to the pages of this Magazine. As with our "Daily Mail" and our other journals, we shall rely on new writers. The public is weary of the reiteration of the same contributors to each of the monthly publications. He (and she) wants something new. It is our desire, for the sake of the public, for the benefit of young artists and others, and for our own profit, to avoid the productions of the professional "ring" of much advertised mediocrity which most assuredly dominates many of our Magazines to-day, though the work of really representative men and women will always be secured, without regard to its cost.
In selecting the price at which "The Harmsworth Magazine" should be issued to the British, Canadian, Australasian, South African, and Anglo-Indian public, we choose that of the two most distinguished journals in our language, "The Times" and "Punch."